The inadvertent self-disclosure that characterized the Nixon White House continues apace in Penny Lane’s found-footage assemblage, drawn largely from the super-8 home movies shot by the president’s three closest aides.

There are three ways to look at this portrait of “an ex-Portuguese colony that really never was” —as a minimalist meta-thriller, as an eccentric travelogue, and as a disconnected succession of beautiful images artfully deranged by narration.

Whistler belongs to a tradition of English romanticism which continued after the war with Michael Ayrton and John Minton, and even Lucian Freud, a romanticism which is heightened by the poignancy of Whistler’s short life, and his death.